Laurence was the Belgian National Poet until Els Moorstook over in January of 2018. Now Els Moors has started an open call in connection with World Poetry Day:

Adopt your city with a poem

On the 21st of March, World Poetry Day, the National Poet of Belgium, Els Moors, invites all people worldwide to gather their most beautiful odes and elegies on their cities (/ countries / states / …) and make them public. In times of gentrification, mass tourism and worldwide migration we are craving for lonely flâneurs and notorious wanderers who want to lay bare the mysterious heart of their cities. Are you still in love with the city you were born in? Were you pushed on by love, or obliged to leave your hearth and home? Adopt your city by writing an urban elegy and take part in the writing of the most exotic Lonely Planet at this time: The adopted cities.

Would you like to contribute to this special worldwide anthology, and motivate others to join?Then join this action in a few steps: 1. Publish your own poem on our page starting the 21st of March 2018: www.adoptedcities.be2. Post your poem on all your possible (social) media and encourage fellow citizens to adopt a city with a poem and to join the action. Everybody can share their city-poem on our website. On Facebook, please use #adoptedcities so we can follow and share your posts. 3. Enjoy an easily accessible and interactive online anthology, a playful way to motivate people to read and write poetry!

Els Moors

Read the poems of Els Moors, “Dichter des Vaderlands” of Belgiumhere. Read the city poem of her predecessor and ambassador Laurence Vielle here. We would – very much – like people from all over the world to take just a minute to think about poetry (and all its modern interpretations) and to write even a short piece of poetry. Let’s make a tribute to poetry and to our world together!

The international ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival has a new home in Münster. From the 27th to the 30th of October 2016, for the very first time the Filmwerkstatt Münster, in cooperation with Literaturwerkstatt Berlin/Haus für Poesie, will host the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival Münster|Berlin. The festival will be located at Schloßtheater, a repertory cinema in Münster.

The idea for a festival for short films combining poetry with moving pictures was created in 2002 by the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin/Haus für Poesie. They organized the festival in Berlin until 2014 and have established it as the biggest platform for the genre poetry film. A poetry film is based on a poem. The poem is the center piece of the short film and can be clearly recognized in word or sound. The possibilities are unlimited: With quiet or loud, funny or moving, poetic or political films, the programme of the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival represents a wide range of the genre.

At the initiative of Kunststiftung NRW the relocation is anticipated to carry the genre beyond the borders of the capital and anchor it in North Rhine-Westphalia. The new location has already established itself as an important venue for poetry and cinematic art, as it is home to the poetry festival Lyrikertreffen, the International Poetry Prize (Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie) and the the Filmfestival Münster.

In Münster ZEBRA is going to take place every other year – alternating with the Filmfestival Münster and the Lyrikertreffen. Managing directors of the festival will be Risna Olthuis and Carsten Happe, who have also been responsible for the Filmfestival Münster since 2014. Thomas Zandegiacomo Del Bel of the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin/Haus für Poesie was confirmed in his position as artistic director. The team of directors will be supported through a professional artistic advisory board, consisting of the representatives of Filmwerkstatt Münster, Literaturwerkstatt Berlin/Haus für Poesie, Kunststiftung NRW, Literaturverein Münster and a film expert from North Rhine-Westphalia.

The Berlin Poetry Festival starts in a few days which means it’s also time for the annual meeting of the lyrikline partner network. We’re looking forward to welcoming our partners from about 25 countries, from Belgium to Ukraine.

On 19 June, the poesiefestival berlin will be opening in the traditional way with an evening of poetry from around the world – “Weltklang – Nacht der Poesie” shows the diversity of contemporary poetry in all its many different approaches, themes, languages and forms, in forms ranging from conventional poetry to sound poetry, Spoken Word and Hip-Hop right through to the art of songwriting, and so covering the entire spectrum in contemporary international poetry.
The poets appearing include Zang Di (China), LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs (USA), Jochen Distelmeyer (Germany), Elena Fanailova (Russland), Reiner Kunze (Germany), L-ness (Kenya), Márió Z. Nemes (Hungary), Christian Prigent (France) and Lisa Robertson (Canada).

The 16th poesiefestival berlin is dedicated to the capital of poetry, the resources poetry exploits, the traditions it draws on and the future it invests in. The festival, put on by the Literaturwerkstatt Berlin in co-operation with the Academy of Arts, will, among other things, be dealing with Martin Luther’s linguistic legacy, presenting Chinese poetry with its tension between tradition and modernity, and discussing the future of poetry in a colloquium. The poetic structures and common features of the Bible, the Koran and the Torah will be explored in a staged production involving representatives of the three great world religions. Once again, the poesiefestival berlin will round off with the poetry market. This year’s vice versa translation workshop VERSschmuggel/reVERSible will feature poets from the Netherlands.

The 16th poesiefestival berlin is taking place in the Academy of Arts, Hanseatenweg, from 19 – 27 June 2015. For further information please go to

So, people, we’re heading towards the next lyrikline milestone, so to say, reaching poet no. 1000 on lyrikline quite soon. Yesterday it was only 10 poets more to go, but with yesterday’s uploaded poet Nicholas Behr only nine poets are left.

Of course, we want to celebrate the occasion of the 1000th poet and will therefore organize a »Listen to the poet!« reading on October 18, 2014 which will take place at the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in Berlin. *
We will bring on stage poets who already have their poetry on Lyrikline (and one who will have quite soon) and whose poems have been the basis for a poetry film shown at the festival. These poets will participate in the event:Ghayath Almadhoun (Sweden/Palestine)Simon Barraclough (UK)Paul Bogaert (Belgium)Jazra Khaleed (Greece)Gabriele Labanauskaite (Lithuania)Øyvind Rimbereid (Norway)Ulrike Almut Sandig (Germany)

lyrikline wishes you all a very happy World Poetry Day today! We hope you have a great day full of words, sounds, melodies and poetic ideas.
We join the celebrations of the 15th World Poetry Day, proclaimed by the UNESCO in 2000 by presenting nine wonderful new poets from around the world today – at least one from every continent.

We hope very much that you will enjoy these nine new poets. Each of them is a unique and remarkable voice of the poetry of their countries and languages with their own poetic power and their special tone.

Each year, lyrikline comes up with something special to celebrate UNESCO’s World Poetry Day.
Around the globe poetry readings are organised on that day. Our idea this year was to collect video clips of great poets which can’t be experienced on stage anymore.
From tomorrow, we present a different clip on our lyrikline blog every day with historical footage of a poet you may not have heard or seen reading and performing before.

On World Poetry Day itself (March 21) we will welcome nine new international poets on lyrikline!
In recent years our World Poetry Day topics were e.g. poetry and film, poetry translation, poet’s understanding of poetry, and last year we presented a serial of the places where poets write.
(see them all hereworld-poetry-day)

We had been eagerly awaiting the “relaunch day” for months. As of 1 September, the new lyrikline is up and running!

Many people helped to bring the new site into life and many people came to celebrate with us and followed the relaunch event at c-base in Berlin or online via live stream. For all who couldn’t be there or want to relive the event here’s a little summary.

Ready? Go!

What ingredients does an event need that celebrates the new lyrikline? Next to having a look into what is new, there should be the elements that make lyrikline the living project that it is – poets, users, national partners, voices, languages, poems and translations. We tried to add a bit of it all and stir well…

The event was opened by our two charming presenters, Joel Scott of Australian partner organisation The Red Room Company and Per Bergström who is the Swedish partner with Rámus förlag. Many other local lyrikline partnerssent their video greetings or organised relaunch happenings in their countries

Heiko Strunk, who managed the project right from its start in 1999 and masterminded the website relaunch, gave us a showcase tour of the site and introduced all the new features.

So, what’s new?

To mention all the new things in detail would extend poetry length by bar. Best go and have a look! But here are some of the essentials…

Navigation languages:

Next to the five existing languages to navigate the site which were Arabic, English, French, German, and Slovenian there are four new languages: Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Start page:

The new site opens new ways to access the content of lyrikline so the users don’t get lost amidst the 900 poets, 8,000 poems, 11,000 translations or 60 languages of poetry. Next to thematic teasers, the start page offers a radio like theme stream, recommends poems or poets to discover and informs about new content. From the main menu you can now select poets not only from A-Z or by languages but also by countries and you can browse the site by poems also, e.g. many poems can be found by categories like humorous poetry or issues like alcohol & drugs and many more everyday life topics.

Search & Community:

Have a look at the new design of the poem page, lean back on your couch after you selected „listen to all poems“ by your favourite poet or find the needle in the hay by using the new search and its dozen refinement options. Moreover, you can remember content, create your own lists or explore what other users like by becoming a member of the community.

Whatever access point you start from to explore poetry on lyrikline you’ll be able to find all the six poets who performed at the relaunch event on stage in Berlin, be it Finnish poet Helena Sinervo or Norwegian Simen Hagerup, who were both published on the site during the live event, Els Moors from Belgium, Pedro Sena-Lino from Portugal or the German poets Steffen Popp and Jan Wagner. Since the latter is the most translated poet on lyrikline his poem champignons was read on stage in the languages of all the present poets.

Can you hear me?

google hangouts session: Andrej Hocevar waiting in Ljubljana

To give the lyrikline users the chance to follow the event via online streaming was a main aim since lyrikline is a web project and its main audience is sitting at a computer and not in front of a stage. Another idea was to establish live video connections to our partners and to poets in Nigeria, Russia and Slovenia during the event. In the end this did not go as well as we hoped and not nearly as well as it did when we ‘practised’ two weeks before, meeting in our first google hangouts session to check if we can all hear and see each other. At least we could hear Russian poet Linor Goralik read a poem in Moscow that night, but due to technical problems, the session sadly hardly worked and there was a lot of desperate asking „Can you hear me?“ This photo of a waiting Andrej Hocevar in Slovenia portraits the unlucky attempt. The more we’d like to thank the patient poets Linor Goralik in Russia and Benson Eluma in Nigeria and the partners Andrej Hocevar, Dmitry Kuzmin and Remi Raji who put a lot of time and effort in this. It’s a shame it did not really properly.

Messages from Space

Other connections to the outer world were more successful. It was fun to read what Julià Florit and Thomas Andersson, the partners from Catalonia and Sweden wrote while they took over our lyrikline facebook and twitter accounts to post some impressions of the event. The two of them and poet Els Moors also formed the jury that selected their favourite „space poems“ which were sent for the relaunch by users answering an open call. The space topic was inspired by the event venue, the c-base „space station“ in Berlin which is an association of IT activists and their headquarter was a great place for the lyrikline relaunch event.

We’re happy that with the relaunch, this new era of lyrikline has finally started. It’ll certainly take a good while before all the little bugs left on the new site will be found and fixed. Continuously, more and more poems will be sorted into the categories, more new poets will be published and ideas for new start page teasers will have to be found. It is, as it was, work in progress so stay tuned and visit the new site every now and then.

Thank you all for coming to the relaunch event, for watching it online or for following the whereabouts of lyrikline!